Marketing Analysis and Planning

by John Eberhard

 

Marketing analysis and planning is a vital action to do regularly with any marketing campaign. This means to review your statistics and then make decisions on how to proceed. You can do this weekly or monthly.

The first step is to collect your statistics.

Let’s assume that your marketing campaigns are oriented towards generating leads for sales people. Then the most important statistic you have to get is the number of leads.

I will define a campaign as either a) a promotion going out that has a specific message and/or offer, or b) a promotion going out utilizing a specific media, such as magazines, newspapers, Google AdWords, email, etc.

But in order to track things properly and do any kind of analysis, you have to also track where each lead came from, i.e. what prompted them to respond to you? This usually involves either asking the person what promotional campaign they responded to, or having some sort of coding system, where each form on your web site is coded to tell you where that person came from. Unfortunately most businesses are really poor at this.

Some other statistics you would probably want to track:

• Amount of promotion out
• Number of visitors to your web site
• Total number of leads
• Break down the leads by campaign or according to different media, i.e. from email, from advertising in magazines, from fliers, from pay per click advertising, etc.
• Cost per lead. This is the total amount spent on a campaign divided by the number of leads gotten. In some cases you have to let a campaign run its course before you can compute this. From this you will often find that a specific campaign in a certain media will have much lower cost per lead. That is your more successful campaign.
• Proposals out and/or dollar value of proposals out. If your company does proposals to prospects, then you want to track the number of proposals out and the dollar value.
• Dollar value of sales. You can track this by which campaign the lead came from, but you have to have a good sales lead database to do it.

The statistics you track could be some variation of the above, depending on how your business runs.

So what are we trying to determine from all these statistics?

1. We want to find out whether statistics are going up or down, and then take appropriate actions to get them up. Often we find that promotion has dropped out or gone down, which is the first step in the whole chain and one of the things that is easiest to be at cause over.
2. We want to find out which promotional campaigns are working and which ones are not. You determine that by which campaigns are producing leads in the door, and which ones have the lower cost per lead. If you have a good database set up you can also check which campaigns are producing actual sales.
3. If a campaign is working well, you want to either leave it running as is, or decide to increase it in some way.
4. If a campaign is not working well, either by having low leads (or no leads) or by having a higher cost per lead, then you want to either stop that campaign altogether, or change your campaign in some way. Changes could include changing the message or offer, changing the graphics or colors, or changing the media where the campaign is running.

Media: One of the first and most important jobs in marketing for a business is to discover which media work best for you, i.e. email, referrals, pay per click advertising, magazines, radio, TV. This is different in every industry. One tip here is to observe what your competitors are doing. If they are consistently using certain media you can be relatively sure that those media are producing results for them. Because they wouldn’t keep spending money on them if they didn’t work. Then when you try different media, you have to analyze the statistics as above to have a clear idea of what works best for you.

Message and Offer: You have to work out what your message should be and how to best communicate it. Surveying your target public is the best way to determine this. Another important thing is your offer, i.e. what you are offering to entice people to respond. An entire article could be written on this topic. You could be offering:

• Something free like a free report or white paper or newsletter subscription
• A free inspection or consultation
• Some free item along with the sale
• A discount of some type, often for a limited time
• Just offering the item for sale with no discount

You can survey different offers or just try different offers and track which ones work the best.

Summary

It’s vital to track your marketing statistics on a regular basis and make decisions based on what you find. You want to reinforce successful actions and drop out the unsuccessful ones. You may have to change the media where you are running your campaigns, or change your message or offer.

Good luck with your analysis and planning.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

A Premium Web Site

by John Eberhard

Everybody wants a good looking web site, but what are the factors that create a really top notch web site as opposed to a boring or mundane design?

I have been doing a lot of web design lately, and I want to present my opinions on what factors go together to make up a really stellar web site design.

Color
First of all and possibly the most important, a good web design has to have a good color scheme. There is a fair amount of technology on how to combine colors correctly, and you have to know the color wheel and what it means and how to use it. One technique is to combine color opposites on the color wheel, i.e. blue-orange, red-green, or yellow-purple. Usually you have one color that is the dominant one and the other is there to a lesser degree. I also think it is important to include contrast in terms of light and dark. You want to avoid a boring, monotone look.

Size
Size does matter on a web site Virginia. 3-4 years ago everybody had screen resolutions of 800 x 600, so all the web designers were making web sites 700 to 800 pixels wide so you wouldn’t have to scroll back and forth to see it all. Today those web sites look hopelessly tiny in the middle of the screen since everyone today has screen resolutions of 1100 pixels wide or more. So I think web sites today should be 1000 pixels wide or more.

Backgrounds
Most web sites today are designed with a centered text area and sidebar of fixed width, with a background around that. Some people prefer a white background and lots of white space, but often today you see the text area and sidebar in the middle with a colored background of some type around it. I tend to favor making the background some kind of pattern or color gradation, i.e. light at the top going to dark at the bottom or vice versa. You can also make the background a large picture.

Slide Shows
Many sites today have some kind of slide show on the home page. I like to make these big, usually going across the whole screen, which then gives them really good impact. I used to do these in Flash, but recently started using a program called the Nivo Slider, which gives some cool transition effects between the slides.

3D
Not everyone likes this and I don’t use it all the time, but one useful technique is to use Photoshop effects to make things in your header, navigational bar and sidebar look like they are in 3D. This includes beveling, drop shadows and other 3D effects. I think 3D effects can really add a lot to a web site.

Forms
This is not an aesthetic consideration but an effectiveness consideration. With a web site you want as many of your visitors as possible to either call you or fill out a form of some kind on the site. In online marketing we call this a conversion. So it is smart to offer something on the site and get people to fill out a form with minimally their name and email to get it. Lately the trend is to put a response form right in the sidebar so it is visible on every single page. It’s also smart to put your phone number right in the header so it’s very visible on every page.

Sidebars
It’s common for web sites today to have a sidebar, i.e. a bar that starts below the header and goes the rest of the way down the page. Sometimes you can leave this out on the home page. Then this content is visible on all or nearly all of the pages. Common sidebar contents can include:

• Your address and phone
• A response form
• Small pictures linking to various pages inside the site
• Links to social media accounts
• Business hours
• Testimonials
• Links to various free offers or things you are selling
• Links to your other web sites
• Sometimes navigation buttons are placed in the sidebar, though some content management systems like Wordpress make this difficult
• Share or like buttons

Movement
It can be interesting to add Flash animations or scrolling text or other things moving on your page. But be careful as this can easily be badly overdone.

Transparency
I have just started experimenting with having a large picture go all the way across in the background, and having the main text box and sidebar be partially transparent, so you can read the contents, but you can also still see the picture in the background. Stay tuned to see the results on this.

Text Box
The main text box in the middle of the page can be white, but it can also be a color, or it can even have a background pattern or gradation like the overall background of the page. This can work really well but you have to make sure it works in combination with your overall page background, and that it doesn’t detract from the contents of your page.

Summary
All these factors work together to make up your web page, and you have to work with them and try things and combine them until you come up with something that works and looks great. So don’t settle for mundane or mediocre. Go for greatness.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous